Jake Worth

For the next 58 days, I’m conducting a personal challenge to get more involved in the open source software community. It’s called ‘60 Days 60 Contributions’.

We open-sourced ‘Today I Learned’ in January. Since then I’ve been maintaining the project, and I love it. I’m learning a ton about programming, design, communication, and project management.

Open source is my passion.

I want to be a helpful, effective, and efficient open source gardener. I want to manage my own projects well, and be a valuable contributor to the projects I care about.

In that spirit, I’m undertaking this challenge. For 60 days (two already down!), I’m shooting for one or more open source contributions each day. ‘Open source contribution’ is defined as such:

• Opening a pull request or issue
• Closing a pull request or issue
• Commenting on an issue or pull request
• Editing an open-source wiki
• Committing to an open-source project I maintain

Several of these actions (closing a pull request, wiki editing, and commenting) do not count as contributions according to Github. So, I may break my ‘streak’ on that site, and appear to have fallen off the challenge. But I think those are still important actions that help move a project forward, whether or not they earn a green square.

At the end of this challenge, I want to have impacted the open source software community, to have a larger footprint in my industry, and to be faster and better at contributing.

I’ll focus my efforts on Today I Learned, and projects in Rust, Ruby, Postgres, and React. I’ll be posting a short summary of my success (or failure) each day on Twitter.

If anyone needs an open source green-belt to roundhouse-kick their project, please let me know! I expect this challenge to be a lot harder than the first, and I’d welcome any advice on projects in need.

Lastly, here is my Github, where these activities will (mostly) be tracked:

https://github.com/jwworth

Code on!

What are your thoughts on this? Let me know!